Daily Image
23-02-2018
MATISSE Ready!
| Submitter: | Felix Bettonvil |
| Description: | This week, all work on the installation of the MATISSE instrument at the Very Large Telescope at Paranal in Chile successfully has been completed. MATISSE is a mid-infrared imager and spectrograph, designed to combine coherently the light of four telescopes of ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), and as such able of emulating the aperture of a telescope with diameter of up to 200-m, resulting in a spatial resolution of up to 5 milli-arcsec (the size of a tennis ball at the distance to the Canary Islands). MATISSE can both be used with the 1.8-m Auxiliary Telescopes and the huge 8-m Unit Telescopes (UTs). MATISSE has been designed and built for ESO by an international consortium consisting of L'observatoire de la Cote d'Azur (lead), Max Planck Institut for Astronomie, Max Planck Institut for Radioastronomie and NOVA. The University of Vienna, the Konkoly Observatory and Cologne University have also provided support to the manufacture of the instrument. MATISSE will be available for observing in the mid-infrared L, M, and N bands (resp. 3-4, 4.6-5 and 8-13m) and therefore well suited for study of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs), protoplanetary discs (e.g. T Tauri, HAeBe stars), planetary debris disks (beta Pic types) and also the formation and evolution of planetary systems (e.g. young giant planets, hot Jupiter-like planets) and further the birth of massive stars, hot and evolved stars, as well as minor bodies of our solar system (asteroids, comets). There is major scientific interest from the universities in Leiden and Amsterdam. NOVA contributed to the instrument by building the Cold Optical Benches; two optical modules that at cryogenic temperatures combine the four telescope beams on the detectors. De modules are the most complex systems that the NOVA Optical-Infrared Instrumentation Group at ASTRON built so far. It accommodates ~280 optical components, located into two boxes of roughly 70x70x40cm size, with in total over 56m(!) optical path length. For building the Cold Optics Benches, NOVA worked intensively together with Dutch industry for development of cryogenic mechanisms, milling precise parts, manufacturing of some of the optics, measurements, cryogenic bearings, specific materials, (thermal) treatments and many other aspects. Today we celebrate at ASTRON -together with the Dutch industry- MATISSE's completion. |
| Copyright: | NOVA Optical Infrared instrumentation group |
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